Since the Web was not tied to one computer company or encumbered by patents, HTML could be generated and displayed by anyone who had the interest and skill to write a program to translate the codes to the computer screen.
Most everything in HyperCard mapped quite well to HTML—text, italics, bold, images, and sounds. And while Ward Cunningham was finding HyperCard easy to use and to derive a prototype from, someone else was also discovering that HyperCard was useful.
Viola
Shipping HyperCard for free on Macs inspired a whole generation of programmers with the power of hypermedia, even if it didn’t generate any significant revenue for Apple. In 1989, University of California at Berkeley student Pei-Yan Wei played around with HyperCard and was impressed with Apple’s giveaway tool. “HyperCard was very compelling back then, you know graphically, this hyperlink thing, it was just not very global and it only worked on Mac . . . and I didn’t even have a Mac.”

…

He Wiki_Origins_55
contacted Berners-Lee about writing a Web browser himself and got a positive response. Four days later, Wei emerged and announced to the World Wide Web community that he had made ViolaWWW.17
HyperCard was a product ahead of its time. And even though Apple stopped development and support for it, HyperCard’s influence would be much more profound. Its visual interface and hyperlinking were the inspiration for the first popular Web browser, and even twenty years later, after a dot-com boom and bust, people are still trying to replicate the simplicity and power of HyperCard.
HyperCard Revisited
In September 1987, HyperCard intrigued Cunningham, but his work at Tektronix would lead him to study how people design software, and he started to write about something called “pattern languages.” Until then, developing software was still considered a complicated and cumbersome task—lots of complexities and intricacies that relied on a guru programmer to work out.

…

It’s amusing to think of today’s Internet activity happening through sheets of microfilm, but Bush was well ahead of his time on the implications of linking together information seamlessly.
As a tool to accomplish this memex function of linking and organizing data, HyperCard had a cult following, as it was easy to use, yet powerful. People could create an interlinked series of documents at the touch of a mouse. This was many years before the first Web browser was even conceived.
Fortunately, Cunningham had early access to HyperCard through a former Tektronix employee named Kent Beck, with whom he had worked. Beck had left to work for Apple Computer and happened to be in Oregon on a visit, and gave his old friend Ward something to see. “Kent Beck showed me HyperCard, which he first got his hands on after joining Apple. It was called WildCard then. I was blown away.”14
In HyperCard, Cunningham saw a tool that could help him with his knowledge-sharing project. “I wanted something kind of irregular, something that 48_The_Wikipedia_Revolution
didn’t fit in rows and columns.”

We see this trend continuing even today with the iPad, so slick and pristine that I don’t even know how files in it are stored.
However, I had HyperCard for our Mac. HyperCard was this strange combination of programming language and exploratory environment. You could create virtual cards, stitch them together, and add buttons and icons that had specific functionality. You could make fun animations and cool sounds and even connect to other cards. If you’ve ever played the classic game Myst, it was originally developed using HyperCard. HyperCard was like a prototypical series of web pages that all lived on your own computer, but it could also do pretty much anything else you wanted. For a kid who was beginning to explore computers, this visual authoring space was the perfect gateway to the machine.
One program I built with HyperCard was a rudimentary password generator: it could make a random string you could use as a password, but it also had options to make the random passwords more pronounceable, and hence more memorable over the long term.

…

One program I built with HyperCard was a rudimentary password generator: it could make a random string you could use as a password, but it also had options to make the random passwords more pronounceable, and hence more memorable over the long term. It was simple, but definitely ahead of its time, in my unstudied opinion.
The computer game designer Chaim Gingold calls gateways like HyperCard “magic crayons.” Like the crayon in the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon that allows the young hero to draw objects that immediately take on reality, magic crayons are tools that, in Gingold’s words, “allow non-programmers to engage the procedural qualities of the digital medium and build dynamic things.” Even in the Apple world, commonly viewed as sterilized of messy code and computational innards, HyperCard allowed access to the complex powerhouse of the digital domain. HyperCard provided me with the comfort to enter this world, giving me a hint of the possibilities of working under the hood.
All complex systems that we interact with have different levels that we can examine, created in technology by the deliberate abstractions we construct and in nature by the abstracting powers of scale and evolution.

I could have included several
others from that period – most obviously NoteCards, Office Workstations
Limited’s Guide, KMS, Microcosm, or Apple’s very popular HyperCard
program released in 1987. The latter systems were all commercialized in some
form, but HyperCard was the most successful, largely because it was bundled
free with every Macintosh sold after 1987 (Nielsen 1995).
HyperCard is the elephant in the pre-Web hypertext room; it popularized
hypermedia before the Web and introduced the concept of linking to the
general public. In some media accounts, one could be forgiven for thinking
there was no hypertext before HyperCard (as New Scientist’s Helen Knight
implies in her piece on pre-Web hypertext, ‘The Missing Link’ (2012, 45)).
Actually computer-based hypertext had been around for twenty years before
HyperCard, and the systems we will explore in this book were all built (or
imagined) well before its release in 1987.

…

It was an exciting time, recalls John Smith; it was the first
large international conference devoted to hypertext, and ‘the hypertext
community discovered that it was bigger than anyone realized’ (Smith 2011).
Joyce and Bolter were there, at their ‘famous, but not mythological rickety
table, where we sat outside the plenary sessions’ (Joyce 2011a), and Smith
was there with his Textlab colleagues presenting the Writing Environment
(Smith actually co-chaired the conference with Frank Halasz). Andy van
Dam gave his legendary keynote presentation, as we saw in the chapter
on HES.
Apple presented HyperCard with much pomp and ceremony, but it was met
with an undertone of disdain (as Joyce recalls it); the feeling was ‘we all knew
systems that had a good deal more functionality, like FRESS, and we sort of
resented being told, “here’s hypertext”’ (Joyce 2011a). Ted Nelson also presented
a paper on Xanadu (‘All for One and One for All’) and Janet Walker presented
a paper on the Document Examiner. ‘It was fabulous,’ recalls Joyce, ‘the whole
hypertext world discovered one another’ (Joyce 2011a).

…

Pascal is obviously still in use, but is no longer the
primary development language for Apple machines.
17 ‘When we called it TALETELLER 2, we were already working on Mac by that time’
(Bolter 2011).
18 Although he also mentions numerous cultural and literary influences – the novels of
Sterne and Joyce, Cortazar’s Hopscotch, even jazz music.
19 Stuart Moulthrop, in a prepublication review of this chapter.
20 Joyce and Bolter later confirmed this suspicion.
21 Developed 1985–7 with funding from Cornell University and Apple.
22 Joyce wrote in an email to the author: ‘the “strongly influenced” makes me think
I mixed up the names of Nancy’s program which I knew about but hadn’t used,
and John’s, which Jay indeed felt we had to acknowledge given his work with John’s
group’.
23 We do not have space to go into more detail about WE here, but it was an important
system in the history of expository or ‘professional’ writing systems; it was presented at
Hypertext ’87 alongside Intermedia, HyperCard, Storyspace and NLS.
24 Joyce now believes it wasn’t a meeting but a conference; ‘If I wrote that in the Markle
Report, it is incorrect. We didn’t have a meeting with Hooper but rather I attended a
conference where I heard her speak about, and demo, the Aspen Movie Project’ (2012).
25 Letter to Barton Thurber from Riverrun, 2 February 1990, Joyce Archives.
26 Bernstein’s paper ‘Patterns of Hypertext’ (1998) is widely cited in the field.
27 For example, Ensslin seeks to redefine ‘producer-defined, commercially ideologized’
terminology that has come into widespread us as a result of ‘specified hypertext
software, mostly traded by Eastgate Systems’ (Ensslin 2007, 7).
28 Bernstein and Kirschenbaum had a falling-out over the Electronic Literature
Organization, and Bernstein resigned.

Take a look at websites and magazines like Wired or the
Guardian online and you’ll see they’re really designed around a regular,
asymmetric grid.
rganize
Download from WoweBook.com
Before
After
Download from WoweBook.com
Size and location
When you’re laying out items on your grid, here are some tips for size
and positioning.
Make important things big, even if that means making them out of
scale. The illustration opposite is similar to one featured in one of the
first books on interface design I read—Apple’s HyperCard Stack Design
Guidelines. If you’re designing a sports news website, then making the
golf ball as large as the soccer ball may not be accurate, but the alternative would be to make it look as though the Masters was less important than MLS. Sports fans can debate that, but sports editors would
prefer to give them equal prominence.
Less important items should be smaller. Emphasize the difference in
importance as much as you can, otherwise the user will get distracted.

Some of the conference attendees were actually around when that book was published, and they have unpacked its importance for personal computing. I just want to talk about hypertext.
One of the main things I want to emphasise is that for many years it was up to Nelson to promote the idea of a world-wide hypertext publishing system. It may be self-evident, even pedestrian today, but it certainly wasn’t in the 1960s and 1970s—right into the 1980s people were still building workstation-based hypertext systems.
HyperCard, the elephant in the pre-Web hypertext room that introduced the concept of linking to the general public, was a stand-alone system. NoteCards, Guide, etc., none of these were globe-spanning open publishing systems. Even in the 1980s, it seemed wacky.
In a 1988 paper given at Oxford that Nelson provided to the participants of this conference (I hadn’t seen it before) called “Hypertext: the Manifest Destiny of Literature” Nelson writes, hopeful as ever:The key problem is…to create a universal literary medium, an unbounded storage and delivery system as simple in concept as the book and library, unrestricted as to what screens you may see it on, unrestricted in its organization, unimpeachable in its authenticity, and as quickly available as a phone call.

…

I began to hear about Ted and Doug Engelbart, both of whom equally inspired me: Ted talking about everything being deeply intertwingled, and Doug, talking about augmenting the human intellect. Again, I don’t need to tell this audience about these two men. When I give talks to a non-expert audience I always include reference to them because it was their ideas—I hadn’t met them at this point—that inspired me. The year of 1987 was a key one for hypertext. It was the year of the first ACM Hypertext conference, and the year Apple released HyperCard. It was also the year that the archive of the Earl Mountbatten of Burma arrived at the University of Southampton. Mountbatten was a cousin of the Queen, and very famous in the UK for his various military leadership roles during and after the Second World War and as the last Viceroy of India. What does this have to do with my research story?
The Mountbatten family estate is just outside Southampton, and after he died in the 1970s, the University of Southampton took over custodianship of his archive, which consisted of about 250,000 papers, 50,000 photos, audio recordings of his speeches and various film and video recordings.

An especially promising trend is the use of mass-market packages as the platforms on which richer and more customized products are built. A truck-tracking system is built on a shrink-wrapped database and communications package; so is a student information system. The want ads in computer magazines offer hundreds of HyperCard stacks and customized templates for Excel, dozens of special functions in Pascal for MiniCad or functions in AutoLisp for AutoCad.
Metaprogramming. Building HyperCard stacks, Excel templates, or MiniCad functions is sometimes called metaprogramming, the construction of a new layer that customizes function for a subset of a package's users. The metaprogramming concept is not new, only resurgent and renamed. In the early 1960s, computer vendors and many big management information systems (MIS) shops had small groups of specialists who crafted whole application programming languages out of macros in assembly language.

Another twenty years would pass before
Xerox implemented the first mainstream hypertext program, called
NoteCards, in 1985. A year later, Owl Ltd. created a program called
Guide, which functioned in many respects like a contemporary Web
browser, but lacked Internet connectivity.
Bill Atkinson, an Apple Computer programmer best known for creating MacPaint, the first bitmap painting program, created the first truly
popular hypertext program in 1987. His HyperCard program was
specifically for the Macintosh, and it also lacked Net connectivity.
Nonetheless, the program proved popular, and the basic functionality
and concepts of hypertext were assimilated by Microsoft, appearing
first in standard help systems for Windows software.
Weaving the Web
The foundations and pieces necessary to build a system like the
World Wide Web were in place well before Tim Berners-Lee began his
tinkering.

But if you take that about two levels more, you're into stuff that's actually educational—you could build simple dynamic models that you could interact with. It's a lot like Flash but it's simpler and more integrated with programming.
From there, I just think of it as being possibly a nice environment for embedding lots of little dynamic, educational examples. A decade or two ago there was HyperCard and lots of teachers were able to understand that and do useful things in it. It's really strange that that whole experience didn't naturally go right into the Web. I think there's still a role to be filled there with tools as simple as HyperCard and as immediate as the Web. It would be cool if it went that way.
Seibel: You've famously been involved in five or seven or however many generations of Smalltalk implementations. Let's start with the first Smalltalk that you did in BASIC. You had a couple pages of notes from Alan Kay that you had to make real.

…

But that Stockholm syndrome aside, and Microsoft stagnating the Web aside, language design can do well to take a kernel idea or two and push them hard.
Seibel: Were you aware of NewtonScript at all?
Eich: Only after the fact did someone point it out to me and I realized, “Hey, they've got something like our scope chain in their parent link and our single prototype.” I think it was convergent evolution based on Self. And the DOM event handlers—part of the influence there was HyperTalk and Atkinson's HyperCard. So I was looking not only at Self and Scheme, but there were these onFoo event handlers in HyperTalk, and that is what I did for the DOM onClick and so on.
One more positive influence, and this is kind of embarrassing, was awk. I mean, I was an old Unix hacker and Perl was out, but I was still using awk for various chores. And I could've called these first-class functions anything, but I called them “function” mainly because of awk.

We need to be reminded of what life was like before the Web.
I made my monthly pilgrimages to College Hill because I was interested in the Mac, which was, it should be said, a niche interest in 1987, though not that much of a niche. Apple was one of the world’s largest creators of personal computers, and by far the most innovative. But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac—new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers—if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence, Rhode Island. You read Macworld.
Even then, even if you staked out the College Hill Bookstore, waiting for issues hot off the press, you were still getting the news a month or two late, given the long lead times of a print magazine back then.

The timeline continued to the work of Douglas Engelbart, whose team at the Stanford Research Institute devised a linked document system that lived behind a dazzling interface that introduced the metaphors of windows and files to the digital desktop. Then came a detour to the brilliant but erratic work of an autodidact named Ted Nelson, whose ambitious Xanadu Project (though never completed) was a vision of disparate information linked by “hypertext” connections. Nelson’s work inspired Bill Atkinson, a software engineer who had been part of the original Macintosh team; in 1987 he came up with a link-based system called HyperCard, which he sold to Apple for $100,000 on the condition that the company give it away to all its users. But to really fulfill Vannevar Bush’s vision, you needed a huge system where people could freely post and link their documents.
By the time Berners-Lee had his epiphany, that system was in place: the Internet. While the earliest websites were just ways to distribute academic papers more efficiently, soon people began writing sites with information of all sorts, and others created sites just for fun.

A prototype edition of
Marcus Clark’s His Natural Life using jitm, though still under construction, provides a sense of how this form of presentation gives flexibility to users.29
jitm is not without faults: the tools associated with jitm are in
developmental stages, and are neither user friendly nor elegant. A users’
manual and help files were not yet ready in 2004. Interface design is
inelegant and ‘‘clunky.’’ But jitm has the potential to address all these
problems. More importantly, it currently functions on a MacIntosh
(Apple) computer, and it operates within the HyperCard Software
environment. This means that jitm is fully functional as a tool only in
the Mac world though to viewers it is available with any browser on the
Internet. Furthermore, perspectives generated by jitm are savable, portable, and browse-able html, sgml, or xml files. They can be displayed
on any web-browser.
As an unexpected benefit of its divided-file structure, jitm provides a
preliminary way to deal with conflicting overlapping structural systems, a
currently fatal weakness in the sgml-xml implementations.

It's an important piece of the history of computing, leaked to the public as a think-piece commissioned by the Atlantic Weekly in 1945; most of the readers thought it was a gosh-wow-by-damn good idea, but were unlikely to realize that a number of the things had actually been built, using a slush fund earmarked for the Manhattan Project. The product of electromechanical engineering at its finest, not to mention its most horrendously complex, each Memex cost as much as a B-29 bomber--and contained six times as many moving parts, most of them assembled by watchmakers. It wasn't until HyperCard showed up on the Apple Mac in 1987 that anything like it reached the general public.
I believe Angleton's Memex is the only one that is still working, much less in day-to-day use, and to say it takes black magic to keep it running would be no exaggeration. I approach the seat with considerable caution, and not just because I'm absolutely certain he will have taken steps to ensure that anyone who sits in it without his approval and pushes the big red on button will never push another button in their (admittedly short) life; he knows how to use the thing, but if I crash it or break the cylinder head gasket or something and he comes back, the only shoes I'd be safe in would be a pair of NASA-issue moon boots (and maybe not even then).

A cluster of innovations emerges, all experimenting with different variations on a single theme, until one specific solution arises that reaches critical mass and kills off its rivals. Think of the ecosystem of computer networks in the early 1990s: proprietary services like AOL and CompuServe; file-sharing protocols like Fetch or Gopher; private bulletin-board communities like The WELL or ECHO; hypertext experiments like Storyspace or HyperCard. Behind all these marginal new platforms, a shared consensus was visible: people were going to start consuming and sharing news, documents, personal information, and other media through hypertextual networks. But it was unclear whether a single platform would unite all these disparate activities, until the World Wide Web became the de facto standard in the mid-1990s. The process happened faster than it did in the days of West End illusion, but the underlying pattern was the same: early experiments, followed by explosive diversity, followed by radical consolidation.

The computers simply could not communicate with each other.49
Berners-Lee thus began to think about a system to enable linking among documents—through a process called “hypertext”—and to build this linking on top of the protocols of the Internet. His ideal was a space where any document in principle could be linked to any other and where any document published was available to anyone.
The components of this vision were nothing new. Hypertext—links from one document to another—had been born with Vannevar Bush,50 and made famous by Bill Atkinson's HyperCard on the Apple Macintosh. The world where documents could all link to each other was the vision of Robert Fano in an early article in the Proceedings of the IEEE. 51 But Berners-Lee put these ideas together using the underlying protocol of the Internet. Hyperlinked documents would thus be available to anyone with access to the Internet, and any document published according to the protocols of the World Wide Web would be available to all.

That’s the beauty of PostScript. You can run at that higher level in terms of how you describe what you want to produce and only bind it at the last moment to a specific device.
Interfaces to Longevity
How can a designer think about longevity for a general programming language? Are there specific steps to take?
John: A lot of languages go after a specific problem. Remember the one Atkinson did, HyperCard. He made what I would believe is the most common mistake that people make and that’s not to make it a full programming language. You have to have control, you have to have branching, you have to have looping, you have to have all the mathematics and everything that makes up a full programming language or else you’ll hit a brick wall at some point in the future.
People would look at us and say, “Why are you putting in all the trig functions?

I didn’t know any better.
Why wouldn’t somebody take us seriously?
Livingston: Was there a cold call that you made that turned out to be pivotal?
Kraus: No, the pivotal things were all unintentional. Like the way we got
turned on to the Web: it was about ’94 and we were deciding between two technologies for the interface. How do you present search technology to the user if
it’s not a command line?
One was HyperCard and the other was this Web thing. And Graham, wisely,
chose the Web. I believe it was because of that particular chance moment that
we ended up being web-oriented and got known as a web search thing.
The intentional things were rarely pivotal in those early days, but the being
persistent, following-your-nose thing made a big difference. The chain of
events that led to our funding had no connection.